


A Tale of Two Gun Rooms: Or, Bad Writing Defeats Good Acting

by PlaidAdder



Series: Sherlock Meta [8]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e03 The Final Problem, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-02
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-09-27 19:35:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10042823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: One of the first questions that emerged as I pondered my own response to this episode was: why was I so much more affected by the scene in which the prison governor dies than I was by what I am sure was intended to be the emotional climax of the Eurus-experiments sequence, which is the scene in which Eurus demands that Sherlock kill either Mycroft or John?I’m going to talk about why. The short story is that the second scene is the moment where the whole production has to pay the piper for the cumulative effects of Moffat and Gatiss’s bad writing decisions.





	

  * This is sort of a follow up to my earlier post about “The Final Problem’s” self-indulgence and the way the writing ultimately betrays the extraordinary work being done by everyone involved in the production–including, I am about to argue, the actors.

One of the first questions that emerged as I pondered my own response to this episode was: why was I so much more affected by the scene in which the prison governor dies than I was by what I am sure was intended to be the emotional climax of the Eurus-experiments sequence, which is the scene in which Eurus demands that Sherlock kill either Mycroft or John?

I’m going to talk about why. The short story is that the second scene is the moment where the whole production has to pay the piper for the cumulative effects of Moffat and Gatiss’s bad writing decisions.

So I have now watched both of these scenes a few times.

In the Governor scene, while the situation itself may be bonkers, the acting is naturalistic, and it’s _good_. You can see this if you contrast the two shots above. In both scenes, it becomes more obvious than usual that all the actors have been given specific marks on which to stand so they don’t wind up in each other’s way during filming. Nevertheless, in the Governor scene the characters are allowed to leave the marks and engage in some (apparently) spontaneous movement within designated zones. We have all characters visible in both of those shots, but in the Sophie’s Choice scene the three of them are just standing on their marks and staring at each other–which they mostly do throughout that scene–whereas in the Governor scene, they move in response to their ‘natural’ reactions. In the image on the right, for instance, Mycroft has turned away in disgust because he’s squeamish and also not good at confronting the consequences of his actions; Sherlock is closing his eyes and taking deep breaths because he wants to believe he can stand to see it but he really can’t. John looks pretty resolute in this shot, but there are numerous small-scale ways in which Freeman lets us know how troubled he is by this; my favorite is the little half-motion he makes toward the gun when Sherlock extends it to him, before he takes it for real. He doesn’t even get all the way to reaching for it; he just kind of sways in its general direction, lifts one arm slightly, then retracts away from it. And then thinks about it, and reaches for it more intentionally. The guy playing the Governor, also, is very expressive and one really feels for him because he’s obviously afraid to die even though he’s determined to do it to save his wife. When the Governor turns the gun on himself, all three of the principals react immediately and begin trying to intervene with him:

You can still see that they are arranged against the wall in a suspiciously aesthetic way (by height order no less), and there’s something kind of balletic actually about the way John and Sherlock’s hand gestures (and outfits) echo each other, but in the moment this all seems spontaneous and real. So do their reactions to his actually shooting himself:

There’s a lot of movement here; first John and Sherlock travel horizontally across the frame and then we see them running toward the camera so we get the differently horrified looks on both faces.

My point is that the acting in this scene really convinces us that something is actually at stake here, and that’s what makes that scene effective for us. The situation is still cracktastic but the actors are helping us believe that it is happening to real people who are confused and disoriented beyond belief by this craziness and **are still protesting against it.** Sherlock is, IMHO, a little too ready to accept the rules of the game here, but what brings this scene to life is that neither the characters nor the viewers really know what’s going to happen form moment to moment. Can Mycroft execute someone in cold blood? Surprisingly no. Ice Man Mycroft has guts like everyone else and they turn at the thought of doing this. OK, that’s interesting information about Mycroft. Can John do it? We’re more willing to believe that he can and that he will, what with the whole army thing; he’s also much more authoritative than any of the others when it comes to handling the gun. But this is what I mean about the scene being alive because of the uncertainty. When he finally takes the gun, he takes it fully intending to carry out the execution. He has apparently accepted the necessity of doing this and is trying to be as humane about it as he can. Which, given his characterization, is credible. He discovers that he can’t pull the trigger; that’s also credible, and interesting. Sherlock, it is poignant to note, appears at that point to change his mind about the situation–he’s telling John that’s it’s OK, and perhaps already working on an alternative plan, when the Governor changes the situation by grabbing the gun. At that point, nobody knows what’s going to happen; they’re all just trying to defuse the immediate threat.

So to recap: 1) naturalistic reactions consistent with how real people might respond in this situation; 2) genuine uncertainty, on the part of the characters and the viewers, about the outcome; 3) we learn something new about familiar characters from their reactions. This is effective.

But all of this is also fighting with a different set of elements which seem hell-bent on reminding us about how cracktastic the whole premise is. Chief among them is Eurus’s narration, which continually points out the fact that she is, during this part of the episode, assuming the role of showrunner. Seriously, if you go back and listen to what she’s actually saying (one doesn’t on the first go-through because one is focused on the people in the cell), she keeps talking about how she’s designed this whole setup to force them to experience certain emotional and physical responses and she’s also constantly evaluating their actions and deciding which are interesting and which aren’t. She has become the showrunner of Sherlock’s actual life and as such is a representation of both Moffat and Gatiss. And she talks explicitly about all the things she’s doing to generate High Drama, including bringing in “prompts” to create a sense of “urgency.” The most intrusive of these “prompts,” apart from the intermittent conversations with the girl on the plane, is the video clips from Moriarty, always accompanied by red lighting.

Bringing Moriarty into all this did not _have_ to be a terrible decision. If, for instance, they showed us how Eurus had actually been the mastermind behind Moriarty’s consulting business all along and that it was actually Eurus who set up the situation that created the Reichenbach Fall, that might have been a good story. But instead, and I will never understand why, they decided to turn Moriarty into a funhouse effect. Eurus says at some point that Moriarty had a brother who was a station master and was always jealous. I could not understand the point of that line until I realized that Moriarty does actually function as a train conductor in this episode in that he announces the ‘stops.’ Whenever one segment ends, Moriarty announces that it’s time to move on to the next one, and they do. The conceit is carried all the way through until he finally announces (double entendre no doubt intended and chuckled over) that ‘this is where I get off.’

I think this is supposed to be scary. It’s not. It’s just weird. The “urgency” in the Governor scene is created by the actors, not by the red lighting and Moriarty’s automated greetings. The Moriarty Moments actually interrupt and interfere with what is otherwise quite a successful little scene. There’s one set of production elements here working at cross purposes with another. Like the characters, the actors are fighting a battle against the basic situation and against the irritating and unnecessary AV effects Eurus has added to her production. In this scene, they win. In the final challenge, they lose.

By the time we hit the Sophie’s Choice scene, the writing mistakes have just made it a no-win situation for the actors. First of all, this scenario is telegraphed at the end of the Governor scene, so it’s not a surprise. Second, at this point Sherlock has now been through the Garridebs puzzle and the Molly Hooper puzzle and he’s exhausted and so are we. That was probably one basis for some of the acting choices made here; everyone’s exhausted and drained and so it’s more appropriate for the whole thing to be static and understated. Third, and most important, unlike in the Governor scenario when they’re all still protesting all of this, in this room everyone’s resistance seems to be completely broken. They just assume they have to do what Eurus says. (In another interesting continuation of the Eurus-as-showrunner conceit, Sherlock taunts her as Moffat has himself no doubt often been taunted: “What happened, did you run out of ideas?”)

This lack of resistance is required by the scenario. Moffat and Gatiss, like Eurus, really want to see them do the tests, so they stop having the characters try to defeat her because they don’t want them to defeat her. And that’s just a fundamental writing mistake. The three figures who are all supposed to be so fucking badass, intellectually and action-ly, just move meekly from room to room and follow the instructions they’re given. Mycroft is allowed a couple token protests which John and Sherlock shut down immediately because ‘we’re soldiers today.’ Well, fine; but soldiers are still allowed to think, right? Sherlock and/or Mycroft should have suspected immediately that the plane scenario was being faked (knowing Eurus) and they should have _known_ it was fake as soon as the girl couldn’t answer Sherlock’s question about where they took off from and Eurus cut her off before she could answer the question about where it was traveling to. (Any child that old fucking knows what city and what airport her plane departed from. Children are fascinated by airports. They notice everything.) Given that Eurus has concluded each one of the previous tests by violating one of her own ground rules (she shoots the Governor’s wife even after he’s dead; she kills all three Garridebs; she lies about the threat to Molly Hooper), **they should all know that they have no rational motive for obeying her by the time they get to this point.** By all the laws of characterization, they should be using this time to figure out how to get ALL of them out of this situation alive. Sherlock has pulled off far more incredible feats in earlier episodes, and Mycroft is supposed to be smarter.

But that’s not what the writers want. They want to put Sherlock through his Sophie’s Choice. For the feels.

And yet, the feels (for me) are absent; and that’s because at this point not only do I not believe in this situation, I think the actors are finding a really hard time believing in it themselves. And why shouldn’t they? Nothing in the work they’ve done on these characters up to this point would have prepared them for it. What’s even worse is that the writers mandated that Sherlock have a big emotional blow-out at the conclusion of the Molly Hooper challenge, and everyone presumably knows that Sherlock will have to lose his shit for the last and most operatic time at Musgrave over the Redbeard reveal and John in the well, so this is not a good time for yet another emotional breakdown. (We know Sherlock's breakdown over Molly wasn’t just an acting choice because of the number of props that were carefully prepared in order for him to dramatically smash. Note that when Mycroft picks up the coffin lid, the brass hardware is attached to it; but when Sherlock smashes it, the hardware is loose so it can fly up into the air when he hits it, for dramatic effect.) They are structurally prevented from doing what would come naturally to their characters in this situation; they are also prevented from providing the emotional pyrotechnics that might make up for that, and which might seem to be appropriate for a scene in which Sherlock apparently believes that he will be forced to kill his own brother. They are instead coping with the scene as written, which requires each of them to react to this intolerable situation with astonishing passivity. John doesn’t seem to care much about the fact that Sherlock is maybe about to shoot him. It’s not just that he’s being stoic. I mean I don’t want to go through the whole thing about how well Martin Freeman does the outwardly-stoic-but-inwardly-emotional thing, but what he does in this scene is not what that normally looks like on him. The focus in this scene is really on Mycroft, and of the three actors, Gatiss is by far the most at home and the most effective; and why not, he’s delivering his own lines and undoubtedly really enjoying it. Everyone else is just trying to make the best of it.

And to cap it all off, when Sherlock turns the gun on himself, neither Mycroft nor John reacts anywhere near as much as they did when the Governor did the same thing. And that’s nuts. And it’s not the actors’ fault. They **can’t** react the way they did in the first scene because Sherlock is doing a countdown. They would both therefore have ample time to get to him and stop him if they really tried--and **Moffat and Gatiss don’t want them to stop him** because that would mess up their plan to take both of them back to Musgrave and put them in peril there. The scenario requires them to act in ways that make no sense in terms of who their characters are. In that situation, it’s really impossible for the actors to make it real. They can only choose the least-unreal option.

Anyway. I’ve gone on too long, again. My point is: Moffat and Gatiss wrote what they wanted, and there were consequences, and one of them was the failure of the Sophie’s Choice scene. Because forcing drama out of your characters by creating a completely outlandish Drama Forcing Machine for them does not actually work.





End file.
